I'm sorry. I can't let this go. First of all, if you have to qualify a statement by saying you hope something isn't considered victim bashing you most probably are, indeed, victim bashing. What you are suggesting these parents should have done or even admonishing these parents for failing to do is punish the victim.
I assume you would be outraged is someone told a rape victim she should have chosen a more modest outfit or she should not have gone to the bar/club/party she went to where the rape took place. You would rightfully place the blame where it belonged, on the rapist. You would say he should not have raped her. So how is this different?
This girl was bullied by text, social media, and in person on school grounds. So she should be banned from her phone (now she is without help should the bullies see her in person)and her social media, all the ways kids communicate with each other. By doing this she also loses any support she has out there. She should lose computer privileges for the same reasons. But wait, the bullies still have ALL their privileges.
This girl should also stop going to school where she is an excellent student and stop participating in sports. So as a victim she loses her right to an education and the extra curriculars that accompany school. But wait, the bullies still GET TO go to school.
Why on earth are we, in 2017, still punishing the victim and blaming the parents for not punishing the victim and acting as if the bullies are just a fact of life and bear no responsibility to act like DECENT HUMAN BEINGS.
I realize that you do not have children yet, but someday you will understand that if you have a child who is being bullied in any fashion, you as the parent are in a no win situation. It is agonizing. You want to take them away from the nastiness, take their pain away, protect them from mean words, you want to punish the bullies, you want to beat on their parents, you want the school to stop calmly saying "we will look into it" and then do nothing, you want to force your child to fight back, you want to cry. And you can do none of that. You can only give your child encouragement and support and love, and hope the people who can do something step up and do it.
So to make a long rant longer, if you have kids and they are getting beat up at the bowling alley you will not keep your child home. You will march down to the bowling alley and demand that the guilty parties be punished and banned from the bowling alley. You may have to go with your kids to the bowling alley for a while, but make sure the right children are being punished.
TL;DR
Girls shouldn't be told how to dress or walk or where to go so as not to bring on a rape. Boys should be taught rape is wrong. Don't do it. You will be quickly and strongly punished if you do.
Kids shouldn't be kept from their phones and SM and school so as not to bring on bullying. Kids should be taught bullying is wrong. Don't do it. Anywhere. You will be quickly and strongly punished if you do.
As someone who has been in the computer/tech industry for a very, very, long time, I personally would not allow a 12 year old to have unfettered access to the internet, nor would the bullies be permitted to have access to my child's s.m. if it were anything more than a spat between friends. IF I had a 12 year old who had a FB, their FB would be monitored, as I stated in my previous post, with a parental monitoring software tool(s) of some type. Not because I am a controlling, helicopter style, mean, un-trusting, parent, but because I know what is out there and what it can do to a pre-teen / teen (I've seen the internet ruin adults' careers because of poor choices, or impulsive choices.). Restriction of the
purveyors, and perverts, alone, is worth the price of the software. The monitoring software's data logs come in very handy if one ever needs proof of harassment to take to other parents, the school, or even to LE if it goes that far. There's time-stamps on the logs (at least the one's I used had them) to show when they and the kids they are communicating with, are getting online. The time-stamp allows you to see when the bully is getting online to send their attacks, which would narrow down WHERE they are getting online.
Bullying is not the only concern with allowing children to roam freely on the internet. You wouldn't send your child out to play, on a street that you knew had pedophiles living on it, would you, so why would you send them out into the world wide web, unprotected, where they can readily be approached by those same pedophiles, sent
over their I.M., be coaxed to meet a new "friend" at the park across town, not to mention be emotionally abused to the point of suicide? The internet requires the growth of a tough skin for adults.
There is parental software available for phones, laptops, desktops, etc... There should be a push to make parents more aware of the types of monitoring software that is available to them. You don't have to read your child's every conversation, but you can scan logs for "keywords", and if you see those keywords, decide whether to read the logs, or not. It is a big, and sometimes dangerous, world out there online, and parents have to educate themselves in how to protect their children from those dangers. I have personally used Kaspersky and Net Nanny, although it has been quite a few years ago, so I can't vouch for either of them in 2017, but they were of great assistance to me, when my kids were young.
Here are some of the parental software packages available today. Some of them have the social media monitoring tools that I used to track my kid's activities, and s.m., back in the day, in addition, in our home, there were no "private" passwords to their sm account(s), our home was not a democracy. If you used the p.c., I had the right to see what was being sent, and received, browsed, or downloaded, on their profiles, at any time I wished. It was not punishment, it was
protection.
If it were today, and on FB, and someone started bullying one of my kids, that person would be removed from, and restricted from, their friend lists (if they didn't get the picture after that, then I'd likely take a copy of the software logs to their parents, and have a sit down with them, and see how it went from there). It's a very tight rope to walk, because how one handles it, can determine whether your child becomes even further ostracized, or can comfortably walk the halls, at school, at the end of the day.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346997,00.asp
